


Smile Like You Mean It

by VaguelyDownwards



Category: Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-16
Updated: 2012-08-16
Packaged: 2017-11-12 06:31:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/487758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VaguelyDownwards/pseuds/VaguelyDownwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Spine's smiles fell into two major categories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smile Like You Mean It

The Spine smiled widely and often.  
  
He was a performer. It was what he did. No deep, existential angst about it, no rambling monologue about sad clowns with false faces. He was a performer, heart and soul, hardware and software, once the weapons of wars past were uninstalled and the scars were buffed out, from his blue matter core to every last polished detail. He was created to make a pretty girl smile, and that remained the strongest drive in the deepest depths of his steam-powered soul.  
  
Frequent audience members might have noticed that the Spine's smiles fell into two major categories.  
  
The first was hardly a smile at all, a smirk, really. It came as a reflex when he sang, or rather, when he didn't sing, the pauses in between lyrics, during guitar solos or piano solos or mandolin solos, frequently accompanied by a suggestive quirk of his stark black eyebrows, the satisfied expression of a musician who knows he's good at what he does. It wasn't so much that the Spine was brimming with pride in his abilities-- he felt he did exactly as he was programmed, and expected no more and no less-- but the not-even-a-smile made breath catch in the audience, and he was created to make a pretty girl smile.  
  
He wore the same smile, or something like it, on stage in between songs, when Rabbit got lost in another of his elaborate fantasies, or when the Jon took something too literally or misheard entirely, when their segues didn't segue and his fellow robots conspired against him in the name of ice cream and high adventure. It was the same sideways smirk, slightly nervous, paired with a suspicious look for judging questionable hijinks. It was a part of the act: the Spine, the eternal straight man, constantly babysitting a pair of eccentric automatons who were never old enough to know better.  
  
The second category was somehow both more and less like a smile. He wore a grin with practiced ease, enameled teeth always white behind black rubber lips, mouth always pulled exactly just so. He sang through a smile that could've been painted on. There was something slightly terrifying in the Spine's grin, an expression more manic than mirthful, always giving the impression of far too many teeth than should ever fit into one mouth. Still, it had a certain charm as well, of a young man trying too hard to impress, a flawed but earnest attempt to make a pretty girl smile.  
  
It was usually the grin he brought out for photographs, because that is how one is supposed to smile for the camera. The smirk wasn't a smile, not really, and so his carefully rehearsed grin came out in front of cameras and camera-phones and whatever recording devices the future would bring, the same look year after year, still slightly unsure and slightly insincere.It was a grin that never reached his eyes, as they say, but then, everyone expected a robot to fake his emotions.  
  
There was a third smile, a secret smile, that he shared with his brothers when it was just the three of them, when he thought nobody could see.


End file.
